Event Horizon

Oh the film that this could’ve been.  This one gets me worked up a bit because it’s made up of a lot of great stuff and a surprisingly low amount of schlock, yet it seems lacking.  Lacking what exactly?  Well let’s dive into this sonuvabitch and figure it out.

The story was originally pitched to the studio as The Shining in space but that’s definitely not the best description.  There is an element that’s taken from The Shining but I’ll get into that in a minute.  What we have here is more along the lines of Alien and The Haunting.  A ship called the Event Horizon was about to make its inaugural journey through a black hole, which it creates itself via a “gravity drive”, when it completely disappeared.  Several years later the ship’s signal is picked up at the edge of our solar system which prompts a search and rescue mission to be hatched.  The crew dispatched goes aboard the Event Horizon and it turns into a haunted house story with people experiencing weird visions, noises, occurrences, etc.

The cast they assembled for this thing is fucking great.  Laurence Fishburne is Miller, the captain of the rescue crew and he plays the role perfectly.  He has such a knack for playing leadership parts that there’s never any doubt that he’s an effective, courageous and badass commander.  Everyone respects him, even the characters that are supposed to be more on the loose cannon side.  Miller wants order and will strictly enforce his command to maintain it but he’s not delusional.  He tries to find rational explanations for the shit he sees aboard the Event Horizon and when reason runs out he does what he has to do to save his crew and survive.  You never see Miller act selfishly; he constantly puts his crew ahead of himself.  I don’t want to give the impression that this guy is a goody two shoes or anything though ‘cause he’s got a haunted past and that helps to make him seem just as real and relatable as he’s meant to be.  Miller’s the best character in this film and they couldn’t have gotten very many people that would’ve been better or even as good as Fishburne.

Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, In the Mouth of Madness) plays Weir, the scientist that built the gravity drive and he’s the expert that was sent by NASA (I think) to go along with the rescue crew.  Neill is underrated in the movie biz and I wish would get bigger roles because he’s just a good all around actor.  With his role in In the Mouth of Madness he goes from a regular guy to a person being driven insane and he does pretty much the same thing in Event Horizon.  This is The Shining aspect of the picture.  Weir is like Jack Torrance in that he seems like a fine rational person until he gets aboard the Event Horizon which turns him into a total maniac over a period of time.  It’s like the ship has an evil hold over him that can’t be broken at all. 

The way Weir and Miller play off each other is one of the wondrous things in this film.  They don’t seem to like each other that much before shit goes crazy so it flows organically that they would become enemies later.  Miller keeps trying to get answers out of Weir but Weir doesn’t even really know himself what’s happening with the ship.  The growing frustration between these men builds some nice tension.

The rest of the cast is good too.  Kathleen Quinlan (Breakdown), Joely Richardson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)), Richard T. Jones (Phone Booth), Jack Noseworthy (Breakdown), Jason Isaacs (Harry Potters) and Sean Pertwee (Shopping) do well in their roles.  I particularly like that even though Richard T. Jones is the comic relief he’s not really goofy.  He’s freaking out over all the shit that’s happening so it’s more like panic than comedy.  Jones also has maybe the best line in the movie.  It’s towards the end when he needs to fly through space to get back to the Event Horizon and when he launches himself he yells, “here I come motherfuckers!”

The imagery in this thing is fucking phenomenal.

This picture has great production design.  It’s like an updated late 90’s Alien look.  There are pipes, exposed steel, ladders to different levels, creepy spaceship design, eerie corridors, a giant cross shaped window on the bridge and other shit.  The room with the gravity drive and the gravity drive itself though are masterpieces.  But first in order to enter that room there’s a spinning tunnel that you need to walk through like what you would find in a fun house except this one’s lined with enormous sharp blades.  They even dub it the “meat grinder”.  The gravity drive room is a huge domed space with massive spikes sticking out of the walls.  Why do they need these spikes?  Because it’s supposed to look fucking scary and cool.  The drive has a Hellraiser puzzle box kinda look to it which is what the filmmakers were going for.  The reveal of it with those lighted rings spinning around the extremely large ball that line up just for a second to flash you in the face is incredible.  This is the bad guy folks.  I mean the whole ship is the bad guy but this is its heart.  And the design makes you wonder.  Throughout the movie you think “who the fuck designed this creepy ass fucking spaceship?”  But it’s not distracting.  I think it totally works as menacing atmosphere that helps to make you feel a bit uncomfortable.  It’s like the ship was designed by Satan. 

Essentially the idea of the plot is that the Event Horizon went to hell and when it came back it was endowed with certain powers and became alive.  That may sound like a spoiler but it’s not.  The ship is fucking with our characters the whole time so it’s not a surprise.  This is a horror movie and like most horror movies it’s not about an intricate plot.  It’s about presentation and being smart enough to know how to build tension.  Anderson gives us a very nice picture to look at and is even able to fill that picture with characters that aren’t annoying.  These people are very likable and you want to see them get through this ordeal.  But what Anderson also does is take away our hope little by little until we have practically nothing left.  Again, this is typical for most horror flicks but it works a little better than usual here because there are other elements that fall into place.

Here are some cool things about this film.  The portrayal of the future is really practical in this and I dig that.  Like the Event Horizon uses CD’s or DVD’s to record their ships log (instead of the minidisc craze that was going on at the time.  Remember that shit?  They were used in The Matrix, Strange Days and Last Action Hero), there are still things like regular cigarettes, still photographs, bulky cumbersome spacesuits, flight suits and air scrubbers for breathable air.  And without knowing it the filmmakers predicted the iPad.  There are at least two scenes showing what looks exactly like an iPad doing exactly what an iPad can do like play video and skype or facetime.  And I want to take a minute to acknowledge this because it’s actually kind of unbelievable.  This thing they made up for a sci-fi movie in 1997 (that few people saw by the way, it did not do well at the box office) was supposed to seem really futuristic and like blue sky technology but it exists now.  Less than thirteen years later that device would be invented and used exactly the way it’s shown in the film.  That’s fucking amazing.  Do you think that’s where the folks at Apple got the idea?  Who the fuck knows.  Some other cool things are the river of blood homage to The Shining, two homages to Alien with a close-up of Kathleen Quinlan’s hand coming out of an opening from a lower floor and a scene where the crew is positioned the same way as in Alien while they discuss their situation in a circular room with an alcove, there aren’t any horrible subplots or a superfluous love story, the models and actual sets look good.  The filmmakers did come up with some other archetypal sci-fi stuff like a scanner that detects life forms, sleeping tubes for long distance space travel and a spaceship that can create a black hole. 

 

With all of that good shit this picture is still missing something though.  The CGI is fucking atrocious but that’s not really it.  There was a whole bunch of footage that was cut out because the studio deemed that is was too gory, too violent and too long, like 30 minutes too long.  That’s a shit load of shit to have to cut out of your movie.  This is probably the main reason why the film leaves you with a funny feeling.  We were supposed to see more of where the ship had been, essentially in a Hellraiser type world where people are perpetually tortured in brutal ways.  I think having that in the picture would’ve helped to classify and be unambiguous about just how evil this shit is that we’re dealing with.  Apparently there was also a whole sequence that first introduced Miller and his crew out on a different rescue mission.  That’s something that should have been cut.  I’m happy that didn’t make it in because we understand who these people are and what they’re all about just fine.  But I’m curious about what else could’ve been tweaked.  Exploring each character’s back story instead of just Miller’s would’ve been nice.  Maybe a problem is that we don’t see Weir crazy enough for long enough?  The ending is certainly rushed.  It’s one of those typical situations where once the bad guy gets his full ultimate power he’s foiled immediately.   Whenever that happens I always think the villain kinda looks like a buffoon.   Like he just got his shit together and should be unstoppable but somehow he’s easier to defeat than ever.  Back to the movie, overall it feels like there was too much cut out in the final edit.  I like how quickly the story moves though so there’s this conundrum of running time and, setup and explaining shit.  I’m not sure.  All the components by themselves are good but they just don’t add up to be totally satisfying.

I think this is a very cool picture nonetheless.  The blending of Alien, The Shining, The Haunting and Hellraiser works much better than you would expect.  If the script and the final movie were worked out a little more this would be a bona fide classic.  Anderson did a damn good job and progressed into a decent filmmaker by this point.  It was a good move for him to take a chance on this picture than direct X-Men.  A few years later he got his own franchise anyway with Resident Evil.  A Paul W.S. Anderson X-Men probably would’ve been awful but at the same time it might’ve turned out more fun than Singer’s.  Whatever, Event Horizon is definitely a good time but ultimately leaves you a little flat.  I really wonder what would have been if Anderson got final cut.